In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(126)

It would be too late, of course. He being the kind of man he was. When Sam’s mind was made up, he didn’t un-make it. He would tell her to f*ck off. Then, of course, the world would end.

Let it. The world had ended so many times today. What was one more time? She had nothing to lose. Not hope. Not pride.

She circled around a long time in San Anselmo before finding an electronics shop. The gangly man with the large Adam’s apple behind the counter spoke a little English, but he stared with big, scared eyes for a while, his throat bobbing, before he dared to speak to her. He took pity on her when she begged him to copy the data from her mother’s pin drive onto the new one she bought from him, and plugged it into his machine. A few anxious moments passed before it consented to be read, but the data finally emerged. A hundred and twenty-three JPEGs. One Word document.

She tucked the new drive into her pocket, asked directions to the police station, and proceeded to understand absolutely nothing of the directions he gave her. She thanked him anyway, having gleaned from his body language the general direction in which she should drive.

She’d just look for signs for the Polizia. But as always, that was easier said than done. There was a huge festa in course, involving extensive illumination, a procession, marching bands, an open-air market, choking masses of people. Cars clogged all the streets that were not closed to traffic. She slowed to a crawl, twitching and cursing.

She found what she hoped was a legal parking spot, and spotted a place that dealt in cell phones and services. She could no longer afford to be incommunicado, not with a secret like hers.

She headed for it, footsteps quickening to a trot.

“Svetlana! Is that you?”

She shrieked and spun around. Hazlett leaned out of the back of his limo. He stared at her, horrified. “For the love of God, what happened to you? Were you in an accident? Did someone attack you?”

Oh, joy. Sveti looked down at herself, realizing just how filthy and disheveled she was. A day of hiking on broken rock, sliding on one’s belly through a slimy cave, crawling out of a mass grave, and scrambling through a garbage dump could do that to a woman.

“No,” she said stupidly. “Hi, Michael. I’m, ah . . . fine. What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“Chance! We’ve been looking for you all day! That was a dirty trick, running off in the night! What on earth were you thinking? After what happened to you the other day?”

His scolding tone slid over her, not penetrating. She stared at him. Pure chance? “Why are you here?” she repeated.

He made an exasperated sound. “Who knows. Coincidence. Psychic magnetism. It’s destiny that I should be drawn to you!”

Destiny, her ass. Her social functionality was at an all-time low. She could not chat with this guy right now. She had a list of crucial shit to do, and he was not on it. “Sorry, Michael. I have to go.” She turned in the opposite direction from the one that his limo was pointed and started walking.

He got out and followed her. “Go where? Slow down, Svetlana!”

“To the police,” she said.

He loped stubbornly after. “Why, for God’s sake? To report a crime? Did someone hurt you? Rob you? Talk to me! Let me help!”

“Thanks, but only the police can help right now.”

He danced out in front of her. “Let me give you a ride to the police station,” he offered. “It will take you the better part of an hour to beat your way through this crowd, and I can get you there in twenty minutes. Frankly, you look like you could use the time off your feet.”

Sveti looked around at the deepening night, the honking blare of traffic on the closest big avenue, the streets choked with people. She could wander until she collapsed. God, how she longed to get this done.

“Okay,” she said. “But straight to the police station.”

“Like a shot,” he assured her, and opened the door of the limo for her, rattling off a string of instructions in swift Italian to his driver.

He got in after her. “Now, tell me. What on earth happened to you today? Excuse me for saying it, but you look like a train wreck.”

This was the price she had to pay for this ride. Too late she had realized that it was too expensive. She sucked in a bracing breath, hung on to her patience with all her fingernails. “I found evidence of a terrible crime,” she said. “I have to tell the police right away.”

He looked shocked. “What crime? Has anyone been hurt?”

She cleared her thick, aching throat. “Many people,” she said bleakly, thinking of the tiny skeleton, the toy bear. “It was hard to tell the number.”

“Many? Good God, Svetlana, do we need to call ambulances?”

“It’s not a recent crime,” she said. “They’re long past help. I can’t explain right now, Michael. Please, give me some space.”

“Certainly,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. You’ve been through something terrible. Just rest, please.”

She leaned back, covering her eyes with her hands to block him out. Michael made a call on his smartphone and talked into it with great urgency, in Italian. She felt so strange, jumpy. As tired as she was, she was jangling like an alarm bell.

As soon as he finished talking, she’d borrow his phone and call Tenente Morelli. She had to tell someone, anyone. Correction. Anyone who was not Michael Hazlett. Maybe telling someone would make her feel less like doom was breathing down her neck. As it so often was.